Is anybody else bothered by an obvious difficulty with this
statement? The conclusion (the US is an overwhelmingly faith-based nation) does
not follow from the premise (91% of the country believe in god). Something is
missing here. It reminds me of a time when I saw a guy on TV claim that 95
percent of the people of the United States wanted prayer in school. How did he
get this figure? I wondered. When I looked up his source—he had cited a recent
poll—I found his 95% figure—but it was not in connection with prayer in school.
(As a matter of fact that topic was not addressed in the poll.) It was the
number of Americans who claimed to believe in god.

This is a trick that has always irritated me. If you can't
prove something, cite something different and move on. Quickly. J. A. T. Robinson,
the Bishop of Woolworth’s, was fond of this sort of hit-and-run argument, which
is the basis of his oddball book Redating
the New Testament. My health sciences teacher in junior high—a coach who
majored in public speaking—used to use it when teaching the required anti-drug
propaganda. It always bugged me, and left me wondering what was being covered
up.

So here, the question strikes me—what is a faith-based nation,
anyway? It would be the opposite of an evidence-based nation, I guess, but that
doesn’t get us very far. For the most part Americans seem to rely on a mixture
of faith and evidence to make daily decisions. We trust that our food providers
aren’t going to poison us with tainted tuna, for example—but we have the FDA
and usually some kind of food inspectors to back it up. We have faith that our
employees aren’t robbing us blind—but we audit the books nonetheless. We are,
as a people, credulous while priding ourselves on our skepticism.

Now when I look around on the internet I find that “faith-based”
is apparently being used as a weak synonym for “religious.” This is lame, and
apparently politically motivated. It also displays a Christian bias. In
Christianity belief without evidence—faith—is exalted. Remember the story in
the fourth gospel about the unbelieving disciple Thomas? This was the fellow
who refused to believe that Jesus had in fact been raised from the dead until
he felt the body of the reanimated corpse for himself. Thomas required
evidence, you see. The author of the gospel, however, has Jesus condemn Thomas
for this. Faith without evidence is superior to evidence-based faith—at least
in Christianity. This is one reason why people speak of the Christian Faith.

But, on the other side of the same token, it is incorrect to
speak of the Jewish faith, or the Buddhist faith, and so on. When anybody
refers to world faiths, they are—whether they know it or not—restricting
themselves in essence to the sects of Christianity and Islam (and the latter,
as far as I can tell, appears to be little more than a heretical offshoot of
the former anyway).

So if faith here is being (mis)used as a weak synonym for
religion, then apparently “faith-based” means simply “religious.” But if that’s
what the author meant, why not just say it? I suppose the fact that 91% of the
people claim to believe in a god proves that they are religious, though that
leaves out the possibility of philosophical belief. But why gibber when you
don't have to?

In this case I suspect that it has to do with the fundamental
dishonesty of the article in question, where the issue is not “faith”—dragged
in arbitrarily—but bigotry. A small community of god-believing bigots tried to
drive out an atheistic family rather than practice the virtue of tolerance, but
you’d never gather that from this piece. The truth is, in most instances
Americans are hostile to faith. Faith-based medicine or faith-based accounting
gets its practitioners jailed, and rightly so.